Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of OsijekFaculty of Economics in Osijek

Place

Osijek

State

Croatia

Scientific field, discipline, subdiscipline

SOCIAL SCIENCESEconomicsFinance

UDK

368SOCIAL SCIENCESInsurance

Study programme type

university

Study level

postgraduate

Study programme

Postgraduate doctoral study Management

Academic title abbreviation

dr.sc.

Genre

doctoral thesis

Language

Croatian

Defense date

2017-05-26

Parallel abstract (English)

Underwriting risks are specific risks that insurance companies are faced with regarding their core business: accepting risks from their clients. They are core elements for business activities of insurance companies because they can be faced with problems of fulfilling their contractual obligations to their clients if they don't manage them properly. Therefore, it is important to observe underwriting risks apart from other types of risks and include them into management policy of insurance companies. The main goal of this paper was to research impacts of different ownership characteristics of insurance companies in Eastern Europe on underwriting risks exposure through several aspects of ownership: domestic and foreign ownership, the intensity of the connection of management and ownership and the level of concentration of ownership. The analysis was made on the sample of 183 insurance companies in 17 countries of Eastern Europe during the
period 2006 – 2013. For testing the proposed hypotheses dynamic panel analysis and linear multiple regressions
have been used. The results of the research show that foreign insurance companies are less exposed to underwriting risks than domestic insurance companies. Furthermore, for foreign insurance companies, internal characteristics of parent company affect underwriting risks of subsidiary, as well as: more solvent parent company is connected to lower underwriting risks exposure of subsidiary, stronger financial weakness of parent company affects greater underwriting risks exposure of subsidiary, and GDP growth of parent economy is connected to lower insurance risks exposure of subsidiary. The results also show that companies owned by management are more exposed to underwriting risks than companies where managers
aren’t the owners. And finally, companies with more concentrated ownership are more exposed to underwriting risks than those with lower concentration. Scientific contribution of the paper is to determine the impact of mentioned ownership types
which have not, so far, been analysed to underwriting risks for all types of insurance business in available studies. Results of the research will help to determine new findings about the impact of different ownership types on underwriting risk exposure.